Thursday, August 05, 2004
Uptime girl
When I first bought a Powerbook and installed OS X on it, I felt smug. Even though OS X 10.0 was really only a beta, it looked great and was reliable. I knew this because there was a command line program called "uptime" which tells you how long it is since the last reboot. I was regularly gettting uptimes of several days. This is more impressive than you might think because a) Apple were issueing software updates fairly regularly often requiring reboots and b) at that time my work laptop ran Win98 and dual booted Red Hat Linux. It was rarely up for more than an hour.
Times move on and now every respectable Windows box runs XP or later. My home PC only really gets rebooted for Windows updates, but still I think my current Mac laptop has it beat:
For work, I'm writing an ActiveX control. As any fule kno, the best language to write ActiveX controls is Visual Basic (unless .NET has a better way). Unfortunately, this ActiveX control has to integrate with a C API with callbacks and everything and so a decision has been taken to write it in C++. This filled me with dread but I rolled up my sleeves and dug out the ATL documentation and fired up MS VC++. Well I was pleasantly surprised, after only two hours I had a functional skeleton control with a method and an event. In VB I would have got to this stage in about 5 minutes, but I would be facing the trauma of writing a VB to C interface (with callback handling). Overall, I don't think I've lost much time.
Times move on and now every respectable Windows box runs XP or later. My home PC only really gets rebooted for Windows updates, but still I think my current Mac laptop has it beat:
jeremyp@titania:gsg$ uptime
22:36 up 28 days, 14:07, 1 user, load averages: 0.07 0.25 0.25
In other news...
For work, I'm writing an ActiveX control. As any fule kno, the best language to write ActiveX controls is Visual Basic (unless .NET has a better way). Unfortunately, this ActiveX control has to integrate with a C API with callbacks and everything and so a decision has been taken to write it in C++. This filled me with dread but I rolled up my sleeves and dug out the ATL documentation and fired up MS VC++. Well I was pleasantly surprised, after only two hours I had a functional skeleton control with a method and an event. In VB I would have got to this stage in about 5 minutes, but I would be facing the trauma of writing a VB to C interface (with callback handling). Overall, I don't think I've lost much time.
# posted by JeremyP : 10:27 pm
